Music: Soviet Overture

In 1936 Dictator Josef Stalin cracked down on Russia’s noisy modernist composers. He accused them of “bourgeois degeneracy,” confiscated their compositions, told them to stop imitating the sound of Soviet steel mills and cement-mixers, get themselves a few singable tunes. Since then, presumably, the party line in musical Russia has been all nightingale and lark. But because the machinery of the Soviet Musical Bureau (which owns all manuscripts, controls all performance rights) needs oil in its joints, not many examples of this New Musical Policy have been heard outside Russia.

Last week a few lark-notes of new-style Russian music were heard in the U. S.: the overture to an opera, Gulsara, by Reinhold Moritzovich Gliere, veteran Soviet composer and professor at the Moscow Conservatory. No streamlined Eastern orchestra gave it its first U. S. hearing, but the wide-awake, six-year-old Kansas City Philharmonic under cigar-puffing U. S. Conductor Karl Krueger. Conductor Krueger’s first cellist, Frank Sykora, onetime pupil of Composer Gliere, had wangled the manuscript out of Russia. An audience of 2,500 Kansas Citizens turned out to hear the overture, and agreed that Joe Stalin had done his stuff: the Gliere piece was engagingly tuneful, richly orchestrated, satisfactorily oldfashioned.